Maria discusses that although she was able to breastfeed both of her children, she feels that strong pressure new mothers sometimes experience to breastfeed can be damaging to the mom’s mental health.
Transcript:
And another thing that I remember feeling so much pressure to breast feed. It was like, my goodness, like there’s a point where they make you feel if you don’t breast-feed your baby you’re a bad mum. They don’t tell you that but they make you feel like that way. You don’t breast-feed your baby you’re a bad mum, you’re making the wrong choice for your baby. And I don’t, I don’t think that pressure is that necessary for new mums. I remember my mum, she came from Mexico, and when she saw me struggling so much with the breast-feeding she came and said: why don’t you try the formula? Just try it, not for your baby, for yourself, you need a break: give yourself a break. And I have this, all this information about breast-feeding, breast-feeding, breast-feeding, that I say: no, no I have to breast-feed my baby, I have to do, I have to do it. And she was: ok I’m going to respect you but I don’t see the need to really put your, to that point, to take you to that point when you’re suffering, what you really need is to be as fine as possible so you can be better to your baby.
I never said it’s going to be twenty months. I remember my husband saying, I think when the baby was six months old, he said: ok probably six months old, six months is enough you can probably think about weaning him off , and I said: are you crazy? After all the things that I went through, all the pain, now that I feel comfortable and I actually enjoying it am I going to stop? And I said: no, I don’t know when I’m going to stop but I’m just going to keep doing it. And it happened to be twenty months, each, right?
